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Does listening to podcasts help you?

I have several questions to English teachers. (Sorry for the number of them! Would be great to get answers at least on some.)

Unfortunately, I've slightly mistyped in the post title -- my actual question could be summarized as "Does listening to podcasts help your students?".

Do you think that that listening to podcasts in English can have a tangible positive effect?
If yes, did you notice any such effect?
At what degree did listening to podcasts help compared to average students who only attended lessons and did some homework?
How many students if any do now voluntarily listen to podcasts?
Does number of such students increase over time?
Do you recommend additional listening (in particular, podcasts) to your students?

Would appreciate if you could provide some examples from your practice.

I'd love to hear about English learners' personal experience too! Do you use podcasts in your learning process? If you do listen then: 1) Does it help you? 2) What topics of podcasts do you prefer?

Re: Does listening to podcasts help you?

I've 'tried' to learn Chinese (Mandarin) and have dabbled in listening to Podcasts. However, for my students I can't say that they produce a lot of language they listen to unless there's an activity/homework and additional feedback associated with it. Then again, any exposure to the language is better than none. If the students enjoy doing it, then something is probably going in... Just saying 'listen to this' without a follow up isn't necessarily an effective training method. Just something to keep in mind. Good luck.

Re: Does listening to podcasts help you?

rogmck, thanks for you replies! I was thinking about additional voluntary listening to content interesting for a particular student. Two main problems coming to mind: motivation (needs to be prefixed with self- I guess) and comprehension (no point in listening to what sounds like a noise). But if a topic is indeed important to a student and they believe they need the info, and the language level is comprehensible for them -- then such listening should probably improve their skills. What is interesting for me is how widely does this approach occur/work in practice.

Re: Does listening to podcasts help you?

There are some that are older, but the podcasts that have the higher numbers of votes were originally included in the Listening section. I think that the name might not be attracting some PC users. Also, many podcast sites are like blogs-they start out enthusiastic, then dry up. If you look through the podcasts, many have not been updated in a while.

I think that any extra practice is good and will be beneficial for students. However, any student that is going beyond the limits of their studies is by definition keener than those that don't, so to take those students and compare them to others risks a selection bias in a study.

A podcast is simply an MP3 file with possible RSS feeds and does not in itself offer anything that normal internet sites can offer. If we compare the 2005 links, where there is the greatest numerical comparison, podcasts don't come close. This is not because I am biased against podcast - on the contrary, I think they are a good thing, which is why I have included them - but they don't seem to be cutting the mustard at the moment.

Re: Does listening to podcasts help you?

Hi, Tdol, thanks for your comments. It's interesting that popular podcast links were originally in that other section. I agree with you that the name "podcast" is at least not very attracting for a majority of people (a new technical thing, a learnig curve etc.). Some dry up -- yes. As for the selection bias -- actually I'm after the keener part, so that's not a problem for me. Yes, simply an MP3 but when combined with an RSS and an aggregator program, new episodes get to your PC/iPod/mp3-player etc. pretty automatically -- I guess, RSS/feed is the key thing here . We'll see how it goes/develops. Maybe once it becomes the the mainstream.